The Source

The house was once painted blue, but pollution and time had turned it stormy grey.

My new flat was in the basement, and the day I arrived I sat on the bed on a plastic-wrapped mattress, and noticed a strange smell. Briny and damp. The kitchen tap, when I turned it, gushed sludge and brown sediment. The toilet flushed bilge-water. My instinct was to call Pete or text. I sat on my hand a full ten minutes to stop myself. I hadn’t lived alone for six years.

The internet is full of plumbers, I thought. I went to the corner shop and shamefully bought warm bottles of mineral water, trying hard not to picture fish stomachs bulging with microplastics. I raised my hood walking back.

That night, lying on polycotton sheets, the cheapest Argos sell, I heard the sound of water; an incessant lapping, a restless rushing. It seemed, I thought, to come from beneath the floor.

I located a knothole in a plank. Gazed through with one eye into dust-choked nothing, clamped my ear seashell-like to the aperture. The rushing crescendoed, a musical roar.

The plumber came next morning. He scowled at the sludge. Sighed wheezily. Tapped the walls and grumbled. I told him about the lapping. He pulled up a board. We both peered into darkness and cement. ‘The pipes talk in these old houses,’ he said. ‘No storm sewers round here for miles. Unless you count the works at Maltsby. You don’t want to go there. Fatbergs the size of blue whales. Makes you sick what folks chuck down the lavvy.’

Then he mentioned a figure. ‘Oh,’ I said, calculating how many days without heating, eating tomato soup from a can, that might entail. I longed for proper tea. The bottled water tasted sour.

That night, eyes snapped shut, I found myself in a seabound skiff. Brown water, marshland flats each side. Up ahead, a figure drifted, face down. Carrot-coloured hair fanned out, like a school of goldfish. Lucy, or the woman she would have become. ‘Take my hand, come out!’ I cried but she didn’t raise her head. I hadn’t let myself dream of it for years.

The second day at the house, I researched underground urban rivers. My joints ached, damp glued into my bones. The salt smell lingered, but the rushing lulled. There was one, it said, once ran here. Flowed out to the estuary at Fallowfield. A memory ballooned, surfaced like rotting fish. Granny Anne. A house with pink plaster and gridded windows. We picnicked by grey shallows fringing the bottom of her garden. Submerged our knees. Watched slippery minnows dart past our fingers, waded through mudflats at low tide. My stomach churned.

Next room along, the plumber whistled tunelessly through wet lips. The mains was off four hours. I slouched to the shop again, sipped warm lemonade through a paper straw. He scratched his head when I returned. ‘I don’t know where that seaweedy muck’s coming from. I’ll try summat else tomorrow.’

The water burbled louder the third night, smelled saltier. I raised the loose plank, shone my phone light onto blankness; wired by insomnia, prised up three more. Under the fourth, a hole spiralled next to a thin metal ladder. Grabbing boots, I clambered down.

Several feet below, a dim tunnel gaped, built from scabby yellow bricks. Dirty water flowed, a narrow path running along one side. I glanced back for a marker. KEVIN MANTON IS A WANKER rose in two-foot capitals chalked in bubblegum pink. A face floated into my head. Form 7B. Straw-coloured hair, a lopsided smile. What the hell was Kevin Manton doing down here?

As I trudged forward the path changed, became springier. First stone, then earth, then shell-pocked sand. The air smelled strangely fresh, and was that a fluttering breeze, the call of a seabird?

The walls opened out, melted away. A sky glowed violet above. Unfathomably, I was no longer indoors. To one side, the estuary gleamed silver. I thought of the grimy terraces multiplying beyond my flat. It didn’t seem possible. To the other squatted a familiar pink house, square windows. I glimpsed an old lady’s outline behind flowered nets, the strains of Mozart from a wireless.

And there it was. The garden running to the edge of brackish water, the girl with orange hair floating in the shallows. This time she turned over, eyes opening lazily. ‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘The water’s lovely,’

‘Lucy,’ I said. The memory of that afternoon flooded back. Paddling with my cousin in bath-warm water. I’d run into the house for tea, but she’d stayed behind. The current seemed gentle and she was a strong swimmer, but not strong enough.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to leave you.’ ‘It’s okay,’ she smiled. ‘I made it to the source.’ She pointed ahead, and I saw it expanding, swelling. The ocean, vast, indifferent, unknowable. Then she dived under the waves, darted away forever.

The sky blackened, the wind rose, fat drops splattered. I turned on my heel and ran. The bricks crowded into view, the tunnel closed up. Under the chalk letters I paused. I remembered Kevin Manton cried wet tears at her wake, while I remained dry-eyed, numb. I’d hated him for that.

At the top of the ladder, in my room, I flopped into bed, damp as a salmon. Sleep drowned me. I woke at 9am to the plumber rattling the front door, and a sodden pillow. When I glanced over, the planks were nailed up.

He fixed it in a jiffy. ‘Musta been a blockage,’ he said. ‘Oftentimes you get things like that.’

Pete rang, unexpectedly, in the afternoon. ‘All right, Sarah?’ he asked. ‘Yeah, fine,’ I said. I didn’t mention the pipes or bottled water once. The tap water ran clear as crystal all that day and every day, and tasted like silver, and I pursed my lips to the faucet and drank.